The Outer Worlds.

As I mentioned in the previous posting, my wife Karli purchased The Outer Worlds as one of my birthday gifts this year.  The download and installation process are complete - thank heaven we upgraded our internet access when we moved - and I've started in on the game.

Created by Obsidian Games and marketed by Epic Games, The Outer Worlds is a story-driven role playing game/first person shooter, although so far, it looks like more problems will be solved through negotiation than gunfire. (I admit to biasing my stats toward persuasion in the character setup.  This is not my first rodeo, and experience says that there's always someone with more firepower - not a bad thing if you can talk them out of using it.)

The game begins in an enjoyably tongue-in-cheek tone: after being rescued by rogue scientist Phineas Welles from an accidentally extended suspended animation on the Hope, an abandoned colony ship, you're deposited into a landing pod and dispatched to the surface of Terra 2 to meet with Captain Alex Hawthorne, a  smuggler who will help you to find the chemical resources required to rescue the other frozen colonists.  Hawthorne is a "dashing gunslinger, one of a kind ship, that sort of thing.  You'll like him, I'm sure," Welles announces confidently.

Which might well have been the case had the landing pod not crushed the good captain on impact, rather like Dorothy's initial meeting with the Wicked Witch of the East in The Wizard of Oz.  It seems that Hawthorne set up the homing beacon and waited beside it rather than moving to a safe distance from the landing site.  As Welles observes, "Shame about the whole 'squashing' thing, nasty way to go."

You then fight your way through some random marauders to Hawthorne's now captainless ship, the Unreliable, which immediately threatens to blow its airlocks and expose you to the fatal vacuum of space. Fortunately, ADA, the ship's AI, is bluffing with no cards - the ship is sitting on solid ground in a field full of rocks on the surface of a planet.

 
After establishing an understanding with ADA, you discover that she's stranded without a power converter for her engines. You leave the Unreliable in hopes of finding one, and members of the local constabulary direct you to Edgewater, the nearest population centre - such as it is.

Edgewater is a classic company town, where everything is part of the Spacer's Choice brand and the contracted workers don't even own their gravesites - they only rent them. The player is immediately thrust into a conflict between Reed Tobson, the town's bowler-hatted manager, and a group of workers who have broken away from the community under the leadership of Adelaide McDevitt.

The stakes are high: both sides have power converters that would restore the Unreliable to flight, but regardless of whether you support Tobson or the rebels, someone ends up starving in the dark.

This introductory plotline illustrates the manner in which the player's moral compass, rather than their quick draw, directs the flow of the game. Nothing is black and white, and both sides argue their case.

The initial portion of the game feels like a bit of a sandbox, in that it's clearly letting me get comfortable with the interface before sending me into the main storyline.  After all, I've got a spaceship - once I solve the question of Tobson versus Adelaide, the rest of the Halcyon System awaits! 

The look of the game is distinctive in terms of both the alien landscape and the vaguely 50’s pulp aesthetic of the ships, buildings and interiors, mixed with the early 20th century industrial feeling of Edgewater – factory town meets Astounding SF magazine cover, if you will.   

I’m enjoying The Outer Worlds so far, although it doesn’t break any new ground in terms of the action/adventure open-world model as established by games like the Fallout franchise: main quests, side quests, dialogue choices that dictate the direction of the story, picking up items for sale or use, buying better equipment, adding companions with different skills, gaining points to level up and improve attributes and abilities, and so on.

But those are just the standard tools from the gaming toolbox.  As with any good narrative, the game's real strength lies in the plot and the character interactions that move it forward, and so far I'm quite pleased with the manner in which The Outer Worlds is telling its tale. Given the number of games where you shoot first and ask questions later, it's a pleasant change to do things in the opposite order.

- Sid

"Fresh from the warp core!"

It’s strange to be having my birthday at home this year without any kind of travel planned in the immediate future.  As previous birthday posts indicate, I often celebrate my birthdays in other countries, or take a major trip shortly thereafter (depending on the circumstances and the flexibility of Karli's workplace) but as you would expect, circumstances have grounded us this year. 

Regardless, it's been a good day.  We had a socially distanced lunch at Harvey's (a favourite since my Ryerson college days, sadly the last outlet in the Lower Mainland is shutting down next month) and barbecue ribs for dinner in memory of my last birthday in New York.

On the gift front, my friend Colin weighed in this year with a great selection of vintage Star Trek collectibles (perhaps inspired by my Star Trek convention program purchases during my last visit to Toronto): movie memorabilia, which included promotional one sheets and programs for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV, and a membership kit for Star Trek: The Next Generation, complete with cast photo* and sew-on patch.  (There’s a membership card as well, but without a Membership Number, I don’t feel that I can legitimately make use of it.)

Thank you for the additions to my little collection, Colin!

In addition to continuing the Star Trek theme with a tin of Pink Peppermint Dilithium Crystals, Karli added to my gaming library by funding the purchase of The Outer Worlds, a plot-driven single-person science fiction RPG game from Obsidian Entertainment, the developers of Fallout: New Vegas. The Outer Worlds was originally released by Epic Games in October of 2019, but I’ve been waiting for it to arrive on the Steam™ gaming platform before making a purchase. 

However, the Steam release has been delayed (for whatever reason), and the game was conveniently on sale at half price from Epic during the week of my birthday, which just seemed too fortuitous to pass up. 

The game has a sort of retro-futuristic 1950s art direction, and relies on a reputation-based system similar to the one from New Vegas, where the player’s actions result in better or worse relations with the local factions. I’m looking forward to playing it - it appears to be somewhat less of an open world than Fallout, but reviews indicate that the storyline has enough twists and turns to keep things interesting.  

Thank you very much, Karli, and thanks to everyone for their best wishes!  Let's hope for next year in England!

- Sid

*Wil Wheaton looks so painfully young, doesn't he?

Dune: who's who.

"Do you often dream things that happen just as you dreamed them?"

Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune

The key to many of the successful transitions from print to screen in recent years has been casting.

Harry Potter began the run with the selection of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint in 2000 - three actors who became indistinguishable from their characters for the next decade. The Marvel Comics Universe had the good fortune to cast actors who seemed born to play their superhero roles, and the producers of Game of Thrones must still be thanking their lucky stars for the availability of actors like Peter Dinklage, Gwendoline Christie, and Maisie Williams for their distinctive roles (although I was never completely onboard for Kit Harrington as Jon Snow, he was just a little too pouty for me compared to the character in the books). 

And that's where an adaptation can succeed or fail. If you just can't accept Elijah Wood as Frodo, the Lord of the Rings movies are ruined for you.

The release of the trailer for French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve's take on Dune, Frank Herbert's classic science fiction epic, offers a first chance to evaluate Villeneuve's vision for the story and his choices for the characters.

Visually speaking, the trailer holds promise.  The exterior shots echo the sense of monumental scale that Villeneuve utilized so effectively in Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, broad vistas combined with intimate close ups. It's comforting to see that the sandworm, one of the major failures from David Lynch's 1984 adaptation, is an epic abstraction, majestic and alien.  I found some of the images surprisingly reminiscent of the angular concept artwork produced for the failed attempt by Alejandro Jodorowsky* to adapt Dune to film in 1975, but not alarmingly so. 

For the most part, the casting looks good - literally, in that for the most part, I can see those people as the characters I know from the book. No one is explicitly identified, but if you're familiar with the story, it's easy to tag names to actors. 

Timotheé Chalamet shows well as the introspective man-child Paul Atreides, who is 15 in the original story and matures into manhood over the course of the novel. Zendaya is perfectly cast for the role of Chani, Paul's Fremen love interest, and David Bautista is an excellent choice for the brutish, brutal Glossu "Beast" Rabban of House Harkonnen,  Jason Momoa is an unexpected choice for swordmaster, strategist and womanizer Duncan Idaho, but not a bad one, based on what we see in the trailer - he brings an intriguing combination of exuberance and earnestness to the character. 

However, I have some trouble with Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck, the warrior-musician weaponmaster of House Atreides, it's just not how I see that person.  I shrugged at a bearded Oscar Isaac in the role of Paul's father, the ill-fated Duke Leto Atreides - mostly because of the beard, which I felt was out of keeping with the paramilitary feel of the Houses - and whereas I can see what they were trying to do with the casting of Rebecca Ferguson as his wife, she doesn't match my picture of the Lady Jessica. In the only alternative casting that I'm going to suggest, Gal Gadot would have been a perfect choice in terms of the dark and elegant beauty that I pictured for the character.

There's a brief glimpse of Stellan Skarsgård as the calculatingly villainous Baron Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, a glimpse which tells us next to nothing. I don't have a problem with Skarsgård in the role, although they must have done some substantial prosthetics work to turn him into the obese sensualist of the book - I'm hoping that they didn't go down the overdone route that Lynch chose for the character.

Oddly, there's no obvious sign of Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, the Baron's heir and Paul's nemesis, but given that Villeneuve has split the story into two parts, it's possible that he doesn't make an appearance in the first film.

Part 1 is scheduled for release on December 18th. Given that any number of release dates have been pushed back during the pandemic, we'll see what Warner Brothers decides to do as we edge up on the end of the year. If they do release it, Ill have to do some serious soul searching - I'd love to see it on the big screen, but it may just be one of those things where it's better to be safe than sorry.

- Sid

* After seeing the new trailer, Jodorowsky, now 91 years old, commented that in his opinion, it is “very well done” but feels that, as an example of "industrial cinema", the director is forced to follow the standard studio template: "There [are] no surprises. The form is identical to what is done everywhere. The lighting, the acting, everything is predictable.”